


Missing Link

by BlackRook



Category: The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-05-31
Updated: 2012-05-31
Packaged: 2017-11-06 10:02:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 585
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/417590
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BlackRook/pseuds/BlackRook
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Nick Fury sat at his table, staring at bloodied trading cards and thinking of the future.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Missing Link

Nick Fury sat at his table, staring at bloodied trading cards and thinking of the future.

If the World Council was naive enough to believe he didn’t know where the Avengers were – it was their problem. The Avengers themselves, of course, new better, but… At least Fury’s handling of the Council had earned him some points with them.

Barton and Romanoff probably had some sort of divided loyalties now, but, as long as there wasn’t a big conflict, they were still S.H.I.E.L.D operatives, and they both had gone on a mission three days after the battle in Manhattan. Natasha was laying enough false trails regarding the whereabouts of one Dr. Banner a.k.a. the Hulk all over the planet, so anyone who wasn’t S.H.I.E.L.D didn’t even think of looking for him in the labs of Stark Tower. (Banner had accepted Stark’s offer, and Fury tried not to think what results such unholy alliance would produce.) Barton’s job was cleaning up the loose ends, meaning the men he’d recruited for Loki – those of them who’d survived the attack on the Hellicarrier and were smart enough to avoid the final confrontation. They were security risk, having been exposed to Loki and Tesseract, and seen S.H.I.E.L.D at its most vulnerable, so they had to be taken care of. That was the reasoning Barton had used, anyway, and it was the truth, if not the whole one. Fury had left this to him, because a) Hawkeye badly needed to do it himself; b) commissioning somebody else with this required to thoroughly debrief Agent Barton first – and one man, capable of that, was dead. So Fury gave the okay, only making sure the man had promised Agent Romanoff to summon back-up, if necessary.

Of the remaining two Avengers, Thor went home until the next emergency (here or in Asgard, who knew) and Rogers was riding through America on his motorcycle, getting reacquainted with his country. There were, of course, those who were concerned if Captain America had been ready to face the big bad modern world alone, but… a) Nick Fury would not tell Captain Rodgers what he could or couldn’t do, especially in not a life-or-death situation; b) mentally, the Captain was 28, not 90 and not 5, and the fact that he didn’t get most of the jokes or cultural references didn’t mean he was stupid. Besides, he wasn’t Thor, so him being a stranger in this world more likely would get him in awkward situations, and not in trouble with the law. That didn’t mean there weren’t a couple of S.H.I.E.L.D teams tailing him, though. And then he did check in with Stark regularly, mostly thanks to Pepper Potts. (They had got introduced before the Avengers went their separate ways, and no way Steven Rodgers would keep a nice lady worried or, God forbid, upset.) Actually, without Coulson Ms. Potts was probably the best candidate to liaison with Stark and the others… A guy could dream, right?

Fury gathered the card together and put them face down. Damn it all to hell. The organization like S.H.I.E.L.D couldn’t afford to have irreplaceable people, just couldn’t, and yet… There was a gaping hole in the chain of command, and no one in sight to fulfill it. Well, they would have to learn to work around it; they didn’t have a choice, did they?


End file.
